


Between The Lines

by devilsduplicity



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Future Castiel, Future Dean Winchester, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-27
Updated: 2010-02-27
Packaged: 2017-11-29 23:13:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/692634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilsduplicity/pseuds/devilsduplicity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel knows he will die, and seeks out Dean the night before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between The Lines

Between The Lines

**Who:** future!Cas and future!Dean  
 **What:** Castiel knows he will die, and seeks out Dean the night before.  
 **When:** The night before f!Dean goes after the Devil.  
 **Word Count:** 1,461  
 **Warnings:** Massive amounts of angst, spoilers for Season 5 Episode 4, "The End".

Written for my friend [](http://magical-face.livejournal.com/profile)[**magical_face**](http://magical-face.livejournal.com/). She came up with the prompt, I wrote the soul-crushingly depressing story for it. ♥

 

 

 

**Between The Lines**

  
_I thought, I thought I was ready to bleed_  
That we'd move from the shadows on the wall  
And stand in the center of it all  
Too late two choices to stay or to leave  
Mine was so easy to uncover  
He'd already left with the other  
So I've learned to listen through silence

Between The Lines | Sara Bareilles

 

 

 

The nightingales were silent.

He figured that he probably should have been surprised that he'd even noticed, but this was the first time in weeks that he was actually sober, the first time in months that he had come down off his high, and so he felt everything more acutely.

He didn't like it.

Everything felt chilly. It wasn't winter, but he couldn't stop shaking, and it felt like someone had poured a bucket of ice down his spine, like someone had hooked him up to a frostbitten IV and injected his veins with an Icee.

He'd never had one before -- what with the whole "apocalypse" ending the world, and the subsequent Icee shortage -- but he'd heard Dean talk about them, and figured that was probably what was currently thrumming just beneath his skin.

Five hours, and he was already feeling the effects of withdrawal.

After this, he was getting wasted.

The door loomed in front of him, and Castiel instinctively reached for the pocket of his shirt where he usually kept a bottle of amphetamines. He'd left them at home -- the gesture was useless.

He was on his own for this one, but he didn't allow himself to feel fear, if for nothing else but the sneaking suspicion that Dean could _smell_ it.

Not that their fearless leader would bother to sniff out his insecurities. They'd both been turning blind eyes towards each other for more years than Castiel could bother to remember. That was all they'd had in the first place -- the looks. The stares. The desperate attention and natural fixation. But silky blue had gone hazy, and rugged green had gone dead. They couldn't bring themselves to watch.

It was a mutual agreement that they would both die quietly -- like dogs torn and withered from old age slinking off into the back woods to settle into the dirt from whence they came. To rot.

He knocked on the door, and was hesitant because of his sobriety. He couldn't fear what he couldn't see, and he couldn't see when he was lost in sweet oblivion. He couldn't stand to watch the monster in the closet eat away at every last remnant of the man with Dean's face, the man with Dean's voice.

The man who wasn't Dean.

That made this a little easier, actually. Dean was dead -- Cas was just going to pay his last respects to a grave.

He knocked again on the flimsy screen door leading to Dean's cabin. If he'd been high, he would have walked right in. If he'd been high, he would've had a death wish.

He was fearless when he was wasted, and he was more useful to Dean when he was fearless.

The nightingales started to sing once again, and Castiel couldn't stop shaking, and he might've started to sweat but he was too preoccupied with his own thoughts to really take notice; and he wanted to barge right through that door because -- _fuck it_ \-- Dean had died before and that had never stopped Cas from reaching out to him, but it was hard to save a life when he was losing his own, and--

Oh, right.

_He was losing his life._

... What life?

Right.

He pushed through the door.

Dean was alone, which wasn't a decidedly common occurrence, but it had been happening more often as of late.

Castiel was never alone.

He didn't know which one was more sad.

When he crossed the threshold from midnight air to warm, oppressive cabin, when the flicker of Dean's gaze stroked across his skin like a heating iron and the absence of it left him chilled, when their _o great leader_ swiped an arm over the papers strewn across the table and piled them up in a conspicuously inaccessible manner, when all of these things happened in the span of about a second, it left Castiel feeling terribly exposed.

They didn't speak. Dean grunted some noise of acknowledgment, and Castiel took that as an invitation to come inside. He did. He sat on the empty chair in front of the table and nearly flung his feet up to rest lazily on the splintered wood, but then he remembered the kinds of things he wouldn't have thought about had he been drunk; that Dean always gave him disapproving looks when he did things like that, and that Dean didn't really talk about Icees anymore, or music, or all those fun, quirky things that made Dean _Dean_ , so it was probably a bad idea to dance around his bad side

Cas leaned forward instead. He stared at the ground, he glanced at Dean, and he stared at the ground again. He couldn't _stop_ staring. He was drawn to it, drawn to the earth and the wood and the dirty footprints that marred the floor. Dean had been pacing.

"Hello, Dean," he finally said, and the rough gravel of his tone surprised even him. He cleared his throat, cleared his thoughts, and ignored the way Dean wouldn't even look at him -- ignored the way it hurt him more than it probably should. "We need to talk."

"I'm busy," came the harsh reply, and Cas winced.

He shrugged, a frighteningly human gesture, then gave his best smile -- it was harder to do when he wasn't inebriated.

"This is kinda important."

He could feel the rage in the air, could feel Dean bottling up the almost instinctive desire to lash out. The other man sighed, released all his venom in a shuddering breath, then turned so his back was no longer facing Castiel. He still couldn't make eye contact.

"No, Cas. _This_ is 'kinda important'." He waved at the documents.

Castiel didn't say anything. He continued to bore a hole in the ground with his gaze.

After a long while, Dean finally sighed one last time.

"Make it quick."

And Cas would. He really didn't like this situation, really had no idea what he was doing, but he figured he owed it to someone -- not to the man in front of him, but perhaps to the _memory_ of what he had once been -- to give some kind of closure.

Because he knew.

"Dean," he said, low, dark. Scared. "Look at me."

It hurt. It felt _so fucking bad_ to look into those hollow green eyes with a lucid gaze, to see how gone Dean truly was, to realize that the man he had chosen to stay with for all these years had already left him in the dust.

"What do you _want?_ " came the fervent reply. Dean would rather be anywhere but here, would rather be with anyone but him right now -- Cas could see it written all over his face.

So he stood up. He made his way over to Dean, inched closer, invaded his personal space like they used to, pressed insistently into his sense of self like he once had. And he stared -- he stopped and stood with bated breath, watched Dean twitch, watched him tick his jaw in agitation, saw that flicker of nothingness seep into his eyes, and _stared_.

"I know," he finally said, licking his lips, swallowing thickly because his throat had suddenly gone dry.

Dean slit his eyes.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Castiel could have cried right then. Here, he knew, here he stood before the very man who was sending him to his death, and all Dean could do in return, all Dean could give him were lies.

He let out a breath, watched it fan across the other man's neck, then slanted his gaze upwards once more and studied the features of the person who had ruined him.

He would never see him again.

"Dean," he said again, and then he opened his mouth to say something else, but the words got caught in his throat and he was unable to do anything else but retreat. He moved out of Dean's presence, felt so tiny and insignificant when he backed away, felt the burn of a piercing glare stab into his back when he opened up the screen door and let a blast of fresh air seep into that stuffy cabin.

He paused, gripped the edge of the door, and couldn't bring himself to turn around and look at the shell of a man behind him.

Dean was just an empty vessel, after all.

"I'm sorry," Cas said, and he couldn't tell if he was saying it to Dean, or to himself, or to the God who seemed to have retreated off the face of the planet.

It was too quiet for Dean to hear, so he said a little more loudly, "I forgive you."

The nightingales were silent, but he had a bottle of absinthe waiting for him back at his cabin, and he had every intention of forgetting this night, forgetting his fate, and forgetting his fear.

He _knew_ , but he wouldn't know for long.

 

 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~  
THE END  
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

 


End file.
